Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (13 page)

With the force of surging bodies behind her completely offset by the resistance of those in front of her, Pucino floated suspended in an inky cauldron, where collective fear increased exponentially with each degree of rising heat. It occurred to her that leaving the club would not just be difficult. It could well be impossible.

CHAPTER 10

THIS WAY OUT

WEST WARWICK PATROLMAN MARK KNOTT
had been standing by the ticket counter with fellow officer Anthony Bettencourt when Great White took the stage. Just as the band launched into its opening song, Knott’s radio crackled: he was needed at a domestic disturbance elsewhere in town. The officer responded by heading out The Station’s double front doors.

Knott paused on the concrete landing outside, bracing himself against the bitter February chill, when his radio picked up Bettencourt’s voice from inside the club. “The Station’s on fire,” radioed his colleague with surprising calm. Knott turned and reopened the front doors, where he was met by a human tide that bowled him back out the doors, over the railing of the club’s steps and onto the hood of a car below. Seconds later he managed to key his radio microphone and shout the word, “Stampede!”

There were myriad reasons why people found themselves inside The Station when the firestorm was unleashed. Some, like Fairfield Inn housekeepers Tina Ayer and Jackie Bernard, had made their way onto Jack Russell’s guest list through happenstance. Others, like Steve Mancini, Keith Mancini, Tom Conte, and Al Prudhomme, were members of an opening band, Fathead. Still others, like Steve’s wife, Andrea, who worked the club’s ticket desk, were earning a night’s pay. But most were simply there to hear Great White and have a good time.

Whatever different plans they may have had in entering the club that night, most shared the same idea when it came to leaving it in a hurry. They headed for the door they’d come in by — the front entrance. For some it would prove their deliverance; for others, a most unfortunate decision.

Al and Charlene Prudhomme were Station regulars. Fathead’s drummer Al had played at the club for ten years and once even considered buying The Station from Howard Julian, until Charlene vetoed the idea. The night of Great White’s appearance, Fathead was the first of three bands to play. During the second band’s set, Prudhomme stood with bouncer Scott Vieira near the band room and the stage door to the right of the stage.

As Trip struck its set-up and Great White prepared to take the stage, Charlene
Prudhomme found her husband down front near the speakers through which recorded music was blaring. “I love you and all, but after seventeen years of your music, I just can’t take the noise down here,” she shouted in his ear. “I’m standing near the back.” And with that she made her way through the dense crowd (Charlene hated the feeling of people pressing at her back) to the area adjacent to Andrea Mancini’s ticket desk, alongside Patrolman Bettencourt, where she remained standing until Great White’s show. Charlene knew Andrea well because their husbands played together in Fathead.

Seconds after Great White’s gerbs ignited, Charlene noticed orange on the wall behind their white sparkles. She grabbed the policeman’s arm and said, “That’s a fire.” Bettencourt didn’t hear her at first and just smiled back. She stepped to her right, into the space between Andrea’s ticket desk and its opposite wall, at which point Bettencourt grabbed her arm and shouted, “It
is
a fire,” then turned to radio his request for help.

At that moment, Jeff Derderian ran from the main bar through the entrance area in front of Andrea’s desk, pushing Charlene toward the outside doors and heading toward the stage. Charlene had little serious concern even then, wondering if she might later go back inside to get her coat, or help Al remove his band gear. She passed through the single swinging door within the entrance corridor, then flattened herself against the wall to courteously hold the inside door open for the stream of exiting patrons. Like her husband, Charlene Prudhomme saw herself as unpaid club staff as much as patron.

Within seconds of Great White’s pyrotechnic ignition, Al Prudhomme, too, appreciated that something was very wrong. From his vantage point near the stage door he could clearly see the foam catch fire. As orange flame crept up both sides of the drummer’s alcove, Prudhomme turned back into the club, searching for his wife and his bandmates. Prudhomme thought, “I’m not going to get through this crowd to them” and bolted out the band door. Because he was “band,” he not only knew the door’s location, but exited through it without challenge. Prudhomme cut to his right around the corner of the building and sprinted for the front doors, falling on the parking lot’s ice. He leapt to his feet and charged up the club’s front steps where people were exiting briskly, but not fast enough for him. Prudhomme began swimming against the human tide, grabbing arms, pulling them past him through thickening smoke and yelling for them to “get the fuck out, get out, get out!” so that he could enter to find his wife. The sixth arm that he grabbed was the right one — Charlene’s. He pulled her from her inside door-holding post, down to the parking lot and away from the building to safety. When Charlene started to wander in bewilderment, Al yelled, “Don’t move!” He
was terrified of losing her again. Later he would enfold her in his arms and tell her not to look at the scene of developing horror.

Jack Russell’s motel housekeeper guests, Tina Ayer and Jackie Bernard, were close to the stage when Great White’s act began. Neither had been to The Station before, and neither knew any exit other than the front doors through which they had entered. When tongues of fire began to lick up the walls on either side of the drummer’s alcove and smoke billowed across the ceiling, the women turned to press toward the front door, Jackie in the lead. They could hear a distinct crackling sound above them as low-density, open-cell polyurethane foam on the ceiling burst into flame. Jackie clutched Tina’s jacket in the enveloping smoke, but the crush of the crowd peeled Tina from her grip. Jackie made it out the front door, part of the swarm of burning-eyed, stumbling escapees, and began to search frantically for Tina in the parking lot.

Tom Conte and his girlfriend, Kristen Arruda, were standing near Andrea Mancini’s ticket counter with Steve Mancini and his cousin, Keith Mancini (Fathead’s remaining member) when the walls ignited. Within seconds, Andrea passed a fire extinguisher from behind her chair to her husband, Steve, who rushed with it toward the stage past Kristen Arruda and Patrolman Bettencourt. Keith Mancini similarly waded in against the flow, shouting to Conte that he “had to get his jacket.”

As the crowd pressed Tom Conte and Kristen Arruda into the front hallway past Andrea Mancini’s desk, Conte became increasingly fearful for Andrea, reaching toward her and yelling for her to climb over the ticket counter. Andrea responded that too many people were crowded into the narrow hallway — that there was simply no room for her on the other side of the desk. The force of the crowd pushed Conte and Arruda past Andrea’s position, through the front hallway and out the front doors. With smoke burning their eyes and the crowd pressing behind them, neither Tom Conte nor Kristen Arruda was able to turn and see if Andrea had escaped her prison behind the counter. Both were terrified for her.

Redheaded Gina Gauvin was one of those who just came to the club to hear the featured act. She didn’t have to wait long at all. Arriving alone after a busy day, she had just enough time to grab a Peach Tree and pineapple juice from the bar and work her way down front when Dan Biechele touched off the pyro. Gauvin headed for the main door — the only one she knew — as soon as she saw flames race up the foam. It was, in her words, “like lighting tissue paper or hay.”

Gauvin stole a glance back on her way to the door to see the entire west
wall engulfed and flames extending ten feet up the sloped ceiling. She heard the hiss and pop of fire consuming the foam above the dance floor. Soon, all light was obscured by the smoke, and Gina navigated in darkness, pressed toward the door as much by the crowd as by any sense of direction. The crush was so great that Gauvin could not have gone back to try another route had she wanted to. As she made her way down the slightly inclined hallway to the front doors, Gina felt the crowd tip forward like a breaking wave. She was carried over its crest, as if body surfing, then driven under its surface. When all movement in the human tide ceased, her head and arms extended out The Station’s front doors, but her torso and legs remained pinned in the vise-grip of the scrum. Escape was out of the question. She could only look up at the winter moon and wonder whether rescue would arrive before the flames. Two lungfuls of carbonaceous, superheated smoke later, Gauvin lost consciousness.

John Fairbairn and his wife, Andrea, had arranged babysitting for their five children and come to The Station determined to get their money’s worth by seeing all three bands on the bill. The Fairbairns watched Fathead and Trip from near the stage, but as Great White prepared to go on, and the crowd pressed in, Andrea became claustrophobic and insisted they move back toward the club’s front door. John Fairbairn wisely demurred to his wife of many years. He had bought her drinks, remaining the couple’s designated driver. “When I go out, I don’t drink at a bar. I drink at home,” Fairbairn explained with a touch of blue-collar chivalry. “When I take my wife out, I let her do all the drinking because she deals with the kids all day.”

As the Fairbairns made their way toward the door amid thickening smoke and rising panic, they witnessed a man, about five-foot-seven and over 250 pounds (“but carrying his weight well,” according to John) knocking people aside as he bulled his way to the exit. With short black hair and sideburns “joining in a pointy goatee,” this “mean-looking, leather-jacketed” guy swung his shoulders from side to side, knifing through the crowd like a fullback. He got by the couple and out the sloping front corridor. Shortly thereafter, people in front of the Fairbairns slowed and began to tip “like dominoes,” in Fairbairn’s words. John and Andrea tipped with them. They simply had no choice.

Raul “Mike” Vargas, thirty-one, had come to The Station early that night alone, leaving his wife, Melanie, at home with their ten-year-old son, Bryan. The manager of a General Nutrition Center store at which Steve and Andrea Mancini were regular customers, Vargas had seen Great White six times before and even had autographs and guitar picks from Mark Kendall. He
was into Great White’s music, but not the club scene. Athletic and health-conscious, Vargas neither smoked nor drank. But he enjoyed Great White’s showmanship and arrived early — around 7:30 — for the concert.

He must have figured it was worth the wait to get a spot right down in front of the stage. And down front was where Vargas stood, about five feet from Jack Russell, when the pyro went off. He had to have seen Russell ineffectually splashing his water bottle at the growing flames. As flames fanned out along the entire west wall and across the club’s ceiling, Vargas turned and pressed toward the club’s main exit. He was seen encouraging others and bending low to help them if they tripped in front of him. But after Raul Vargas got past Andrea Mancini’s ticket counter and into the entrance corridor, no one saw him move any farther.

Tribute band Human Clay was represented in the crowd by its lead singer, Michael Kaczmarczyk. He was there to see Great White with his girlfriend, Lisa DelSesto, and Lisa’s twin sister, Cara. According to Kaczmarczyk, when he first saw flames consuming the egg-crate foam behind the band, “I put my beer down and grabbed the twins.” A good call. All three made it out the front door unharmed.

One minute post-ignition, the Prudhommes, Jackie Bernard, Tom Conte’s duo, and the Kaczmarczyk trio stood in The Station’s parking lot looking back at the building from which they had just escaped. A few ran back to help. Those outside shouted frantically for missing friends, over screams rising from within. All around, desperate people pulled out those millennial personal tracking devices — cell phones — to speed-dial the missing. At that point, the whereabouts of Steve, Andrea, and Keith Mancini, John and Andrea Fairbairn, Gina Gauvin, Tina Ayer, and Raul Vargas — and many, many others — were unknown.

Earlier on, after the pyro ignited the foam on The Station’s walls, the club’s fire alarm system was triggered, either by the heat or by light tech Scooter Stone’s pulling an alarm box at the light board. A piercing horn sounded, well after Great White had stopped playing, with flames towering behind them. Had there been automatic fire sprinklers, as required in all modern places of public assembly, they also would have been activated by the rising heat, spraying ceiling and walls with high-pressure water and likely knocking down the fire before it picked up freight-train pace and intensity. Without them, however, patrons who did not escape The Station within ninety seconds of ignition stood little chance of survival.

CHAPTER 11